Friday, August 31, 2007

Continued, con’t.

Prof. McGann: "In an epoch like our own, where the limits of knowledge are mapped onto models of language, the special character of historical criticism (as opposed to literary hermeneutics) may be clarified by asking the following question: must we regard the channels of communication as part of the message of the texts we study? Or are the channels to be treated purely vehicular forms whose ideal condition is to be transparent to the texts they deliver?" (The Scholar's Art, 121)

Clarified? First of all, not one ("the following") question is posed, but two. And both posit two seemingly opposing propositions: that either the medium is the message or it's vehicular. Notice, too, that in the second of these questions, the deck is stacked: "purely," "ideal condition." I think the upshot of the essay in which the quote appears, "Mr. James and His Discovery," mediates this a little bit (again, McGann is expansive, brilliant, too) - yet it turns out, as you will have guessed, that the essay's really another attack on "intentionality." ("Mastering textuality," as he nicely puts it, "is not finally the point of entering the textual condition." No, not "finally.") McGann's essay describes a textual crux which Henry James, perversely and characteristically, flat out refused to clear up himself. It's a fine essay about that crux, yet the elephant in the overstuffed room here is that should James have made his "intention" known, that crux wouldn't serve the argument. His intention was to conceal his intention, but not so that we could read The Ambassadors in simultaneously contradictory ways! Of course we have to decide, as readers, how to make do with antithetically mixed texts. I don't see why that's a big deal. If we care, we read a number of different versions of them, various translations... or we don't. This doesn't undo editorial responsibility? McGann isn't arguing that it doesn't - but he is saying that "in an important sense there is no such thing as a bad text." Would Shakespeare really have agreed? Are we saying that it wouldn't matter whether he'd have or not because as readers we "master" the texts ourselves? That's disturbing, but it does explain why many poets writing now don't have to care about form except as something to overcome; after all, "each [text] is best of all just because each is so deeply involved with all the others." (131)

Don't get me wrong, I'm having a ball reading these essays, and learning a great deal. I'm... argufying. It all sends me back to Empson, who had little trouble exposing the fallacy of the intentional fallacy.

No comments:

DON SHARE

"Don Share is a poet and polymath extraordinaire and a great gift to the literary scene at large." - Aram Saroyan

About Wishbone (from Black Sparrow): "The most soulful book I've read in a long, long time." - Alice Fulton

"Don Share's work is compressed as a haiku, intent as a tanka, witty as a sonnet, witless as a song, relentless as an expose, patter without pretension...his elegant poetry, exposed as a haiku, expansive as a renga, boisterous as a bridge, happy as Delmore Schwartz with Lou Reed and vice versa, vivacious as the living day, sustained like a whole note, clipped as a grace note, loving various and shrewd as a thingist, soapy as Ponge, delightful as light, dedefining as a new rite, built out of attention, music and sight." - David Shapiro

"Squandermania is a book of associative delight, even when the poems are at their most grave. They combine the obliquity of Mina Loy, the incantatory freshness of Roethke, and even Plath’s devotion to nursery rhyme to leaven the book’s prevailing tones of irony, sorrow, and regret. The poet’s awareness of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness. And yet the poet keeps faith with language by allowing language to drive the poems, even as the poet’s occasions and subject matter are grounded in what Hopkins called 'the in-earnestness of speech.'" - Tom Sleigh

About Union: "Few poets manage such dexterous and fresh music. Few books are as lovely or profound." - Alice Fulton

"Brimming with heart and intelligence... confirmation of Don Share’s stature in American letters. Evidenced by a return to his debut collection, he’s been at the summit from the beginning." - William Wright, Oxford American

"Don Share's earnest, moving first volume, Union, represents the promising next stage in so-called Southern narrative poetry. Share writes clear, well-crafted page-long poems about romance, memory and separation ("our house tocks and ticks/ like an inherited clock whose hour hand sticks"). He may, however, achieve greater recognition for longer work (like "Pax Americana") in which his own stories join those of Memphis, Tennessee and of the Civil War's difficult, lingering guilt: "Where the United States ends/ and begins// The Mississippi is/ a long American wound." - Publishers Weekly

"I delight in the precision of these chiseled poems and in the sizeable, important ambition of Share's imagination." - David Baker

"Union is a tour de force, establishing Share’s credentials as well as his poetic voice." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"... something special. I hadn't known his poetry at all; it is brilliant." - Eric Ormsby

"The poetry of Don Share expresses many tensions between Memphis past and Memphis present, much like the novels and short stories of Peter Taylor." - Wanda Rushing, Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South

About Miguel Hernandez: "There is a sense of shared elation between reader and translator that confirms the delight of exact sensation when the poems feel transmitted by that cautious and subtle alchemy that is the translator's skill. I have felt this with Don Share's versions of Miguel Hernandez: but this is also because he is a fine poet in his own right, one who surrenders his sensibilities to the task of transference." - Derek Walcott

"Share manages to make Hernández-in-English dazzle, bringing readers closer to the poet's sense of language and meaning." - Huffington Post

About Bunting's Persia: Guardian Book of the Year, 2012 and Paris Review staff pick!

"Both the publishing house and the book’s editor Don Share have done an excellent job: a slim and attractive book, a chronological poet-by-poet running order, and a fine introduction by Share, full of details about Bunting’s curious life." - Bookslut

"I read it on Valentine’s Day." - Lorin Stein

"Virtuoso writing by any standard... deserves to be famous." - The Hudson Review

"Bunting's Persia is a delight..." - Alastair Johnston, Booktryst

About The Traumatophile: "Trenchant, smart-ass, broken-hearted, hantée, swoony, maudlin, mordant, sinister, gloomy, goofy, eyes open and counting every penny, these are. And inspiring. How many poems can you say that about, anymore?" - The Unreliable Narrator blog